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The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

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Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#61

Post by cyberrock »

samat wrote: post #38

I feel so sorry for Arabs now, just read that paragraph about everyday experience of trying to write English-Arabic text in the mail or any other editor. > I have watched senior engineers, fluent in both Arabic and English, give up on writing a long email in Outlook on a Wednesday afternoon because the cursor would not behave, and switch to Arabic-only or English-only because the cognitive cost of fighting the editor…

I recently learned how messed up URLs are in RtL and I'm also eternally grateful to not have to deal with that. Simulated example:

    https://example.com/[Arabic or Hebrew start of sentence]
                                            wrapped_url_part
It seems like there are probably some phishing attacks based on this.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#62

Post by kstrauser »

dhosek wrote: post #51
samat wrote: post #38

I feel so sorry for Arabs now, just read that paragraph about everyday experience of trying to write English-Arabic text in the mail or any other editor. > I have watched senior engineers, fluent in both Arabic and English, give up on writing a long email in Outlook on a Wednesday afternoon because the cursor would not behave, and switch to Arabic-only or English-only because the cognitive cost of fighting the editor…

The complexities of mixed LR and RL text are quite astonishing since it’s not really even a case of just switching modes when switching scripts since double-nested (or more) texts can change the semantics of line breaks. This article provides a good overview: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf [1] In college [2], when I wanted to quote some texts from Exodus in Hebrew in a paper that I wrote, I ended up a…

That link’s a 404.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#63

Post by ibn-ashraf »

slibhb wrote: post #30
somat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, English has a joined form(cursive) that is nearly dead because mechanical text assistance devices (first typewriters, now computers) work much better with the block form. While sad in a cultural loss sort of way the joined form only really makes sense when the text is hand written. I am not familiar with the history of Arabic typography, but I sort of assume there was an archaic block form and their curre…

Another wrinkle with Arabic is linguistic conservatism. Due to Islamism and the idea that Arabic is the language of of God (the Quran was written in Arabic by the supposedly illiterate prophet), Arabic has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation. Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords,…

With all due respect, your comment comes off as a bit ignorant and rude. A few points:

Firstly, the Qur'an wasn't written by the Prophet, he would dictate it and it would be written by his scribes.

Secondly, it's hard to argue that Islam has had a negative effect on Arabic or caused it to lag behind. In fact, it's easy to argue for the opposite. It's a historical fact that the Arabic language developed and proliferated rapidly due to the rise and spread of Islam. This is when its script and grammar were standardized, and when more and more works started being composed. And shortly thereafter the Islamic Golden Age began.

I don't have any issue with Hebrew, and maybe it is easier to learn. But this is because it was a dead language which was revived, resulting in a simplified language. Almost every other major language on Earth will have the same amount of "innovation" as Arabic. In fact, Arabic has many colloquial dialects which are used in day to day conversations, and these do consist of a simplified version with many loanwords. So I really don't know what you mean by a lack of innovation.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#65

Post by simonask »

ibn-ashraf wrote: post #63
slibhb wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another wrinkle with Arabic is linguistic conservatism. Due to Islamism and the idea that Arabic is the language of of God (the Quran was written in Arabic by the supposedly illiterate prophet), Arabic has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation. Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords,…

With all due respect, your comment comes off as a bit ignorant and rude. A few points: Firstly, the Qur'an wasn't written by the Prophet, he would dictate it and it would be written by his scribes. Secondly, it's hard to argue that Islam has had a negative effect on Arabic or caused it to lag behind. In fact, it's easy to argue for the opposite. It's a historical fact that the Arabic language developed and proliferat…

I don’t think anybody said that Arabic has suffered a complete standstill, and it has doubtlessly evolved significantly.

But if you compare it with basically any other major language, it’s clearly much, much more conservative. If you are a native English speaker, understanding English from 1,000 years ago is like learning a completely different language. If you are a native speaker of Italian, you cannot understand a text in Latin without significant training. This is true for all European languages other than Icelandic.

Chinese is pretty similar, even though the written language is slightly more stable.

So in comparison, Arabic is incredibly conservative.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#66

Post by raphlinus »

qingcharles wrote: post #56
samat wrote: post #38

I feel so sorry for Arabs now, just read that paragraph about everyday experience of trying to write English-Arabic text in the mail or any other editor. > I have watched senior engineers, fluent in both Arabic and English, give up on writing a long email in Outlook on a Wednesday afternoon because the cursor would not behave, and switch to Arabic-only or English-only because the cognitive cost of fighting the editor…

I was lucky enough to date someone from the Gulf, so I forced myself to understand and read Arabic scripts (but not understand the text), which is a huge bonus when creating multi-lingual designs. I already had a good understand of CJK scripts, and you'll come across RtL there, with things like tategaki which is both vertical and RtL at the same time (and can include quotes in other languages such as English and Arab…

I love this question. Basically all scripts have things that make them challenging to render, sometimes little things, sometimes bigger ones.

Cyrillic for Russian is reasonably straightforward, but it's also used for many other languages. The variation in style is particularly notable for Bulgarian[1]. A sophisticated font might have a "loca" table with locale-specific adjustments, but this is not universal yet, for example the issue to add it to Open Sans is still open[2]. To see the differences, try [3] and use the Language dropdown to select Bulgarian.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_alphabet

[2]: https://github.com/googlefonts/opensans/issues/114

[3]: https://localfonts.eu/freefonts/traditional-cyrillic-free-fo...

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#67

Post by gus_massa »

kstrauser wrote: post #62
dhosek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexities of mixed LR and RL text are quite astonishing since it’s not really even a case of just switching modes when switching scripts since double-nested (or more) texts can change the semantics of line breaks. This article provides a good overview: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf [1] In college [2], when I wanted to quote some texts from Exodus in Hebrew in a paper that I wrote, I ended up a…

That link’s a 404.

The link says

https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf ¹

There is no space between pdf and ¹, so the HN server assumes incorrectly that the ¹ is part of the link.

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#68

Post by NooneAtAll3 »

> Editable; go on, click in. Place the caret at the start of the line, hold the Left arrow, and enjoy the moment it reaches the version number, where it will jump, double back, or sail through depending on your browser.

what's missing here is "use shift + arrow keys for selection"

Firefox manages movement just fine. Selection tho? oh boi

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#69

Post by mschuster91 »

kstrauser wrote: post #62
dhosek wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexities of mixed LR and RL text are quite astonishing since it’s not really even a case of just switching modes when switching scripts since double-nested (or more) texts can change the semantics of line breaks. This article provides a good overview: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf [1] In college [2], when I wanted to quote some texts from Exodus in Hebrew in a paper that I wrote, I ended up a…

That link’s a 404.

Strip the superscript-1 character at the end, I'm surprised HNs link formatter regex detects it as part of the link: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb08-1/tb17knutmix.pdf

Re: The experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

#70

Post by mschuster91 »

slibhb wrote: post #43
hackpelican wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Muslims don’t believe Arabic is the language of God. They believe that the Quran was revealed in Arabic (true). Thinking the creator of the heavens and earth only speaks one language is absurd. It also kind of implies that Muslims believe in a superiority of Arabs which is also not true. Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world. Conflating the…

I didn't write "God only speaks Arabic" in Islam. That's your intepretation of my post. All I meant was that Arabic has special status in Islam. > Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world. I didn't say Arabic has not innovated or evolved; only that it "has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation". My belief is that that is due to…

> And -- to really kick the hornet's nest -- it's also not a coincidence that there have been so few outstanding Arab writers (in Arabic) in the past 100 years. One novelist and a couple poets.

Now, reading that point one might ask the question if writing has been properly funded, or if the priority of cultural funding in the Arab world has been lower than, say, the funding of architecture and other forms of art. And on top of that, I'd also have a serious look at the market size, especially when compared with English-language writing.

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